Up and Down Wall Street

Imagine That!

With no employment report on Friday, there was an unfamiliar quiet in trading rooms instead of the usual frenetic activity.

Poor Mortimer and Randolph, poor Louis and Billy Ray, and all their latter-day counterparts. What's left for them to do without numbers from the government data mills to trade on?

In the 1983 comedy film Trading Places, two patrician WASP brothers, Mortimer and Randolph Duke, head an old-money Philadelphia brokerage firm specializing in commodities. To a settle a wager on the age-old question of nature versus nurture in determining success, they contrive to make their grandniece's fiancé, the blue-blooded Louis Winthorpe...